The oldest boy, Cal, 15, has as usual fed the Benadryl he (supposedly) keeps on hand for his allergies to the youngest, Albie (who believes they’re Tic Tacs), so he’ll doze off and leave the rest of them alone. The plot, such as it is, involves a terrible occurrence during the summer when all six children of the now married Beverly and Bert are together at Bert’s parents’ place in Virginia. Moving fluidly from one character to another and back and forth in time over 50 years, Patchett manages to capture those moments of life that, strung together, however awkwardly, constitute family history: the couples reconfigured, the children thrown together in shifting alliances, united in their resentment of their flawed parents. Or Albie, Bert’s youngest, confronting Franny over the novel that Leon Posten has made of their not-quite-blended families: “Commonwealth.”
Or Holly, Bert’s oldest daughter, showing her elderly mother around the ashram in Switzerland where she’s lived for 20 years. Or it might be Franny, glimpsed as a newly christened baby back then, introducing us to Leon Posten, the famous writer she unwittingly captivates while waiting tables at the Palmer House in Chicago 20 some years later. It might be Fix, the policeman from Torrance, Calif., describing the christening party where his beautiful wife, Beverly, first encounters Bert, the man who will break up his marriage. There is something of the family photo album about Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Commonwealth” - as if, for every page we turn to at random, someone pictured might lean in and tell us, “Oh, that was when.
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